25/04/2017 - GROUP EXHIBITION

I chose Equality and Diversity as my group for the final exhibition because my work is about preserving the natural diversity of our planet, and giving it a voice in the modern world. I felt that my work could also have been suited to Text and Writing or Process and Materiality, however as I felt none of the groups really captured what my work is about in entirety, I decided just to go for Equality and Diversity. I also thought, because of theme, my work would be very different to most other peoples work on the subject, and could therefore provide a bit more variety to our exhibition.

On arrival I borrowed a pasting desk, brushes and bucket from the Fine Art department to use to paste my CMYK seperations directly to the wall. However as soon as I set my station up I instantly was drawn to the aesthetic qualities of rickety bench with FINE ART crudely sprayed in red on it's surface. As my piece was using industry transparency as both a critique and proposed solution to the inherent corruptions of the advertising world, I thought installing the bench, bucket and pasting brush below my posters would really reinforce my message. As I am often queried about exactly how I paste works to the wall, I also thought people might be interested to see my process laid out. As well as this I also realised it might be interesting for fellow uni students, who may have noticed my work around the city, to connect the dots and realise the source of the posters was also a fellow student.


I also hung a finished example of my print on high quality paper from two bulldog clips. In doing this I hoped to continue my style of working environment style workshop presentation. By hanging my print from bulldog clips I hope to suggest the appearance of a drying print straight from the press. Also, as I know I will probably be unable to remove the posters pasted to the wall in one piece it was important to me that atleast one of my pieces could actually be preserved and taken home. This method allowed me to present my image aesthetically and also didn't require any adjustments to the print itself.

I am really glad I chose to paste my posters to the wall directly, as I felt it gave my presentation extra authenticity. As each poster was cut induvidually from a larger sheet, each varies slightly in size and shape. Their parallel wall presentation made this more apparent and gave a sort of urban ruggedness to the format.

On the opposite wall I also had photos of my pieces in-situ, mounted on foam board. These were an absolute nightmare to get to stick to the wall. Stupidly, I intially tried to secure them with a dab of wallpaper paste at each corner. This worked wonderfully for about two hours until I was just about finished and getting ready to leave when the first of them fell. In the time it took me to devise a better solution using velcro tape most of the others had also subsided and needed re-attaching. When I arrived the next day for the presentations this paste had caused the boards the pictures were mounted on to bow and curve away from the wall, meaning once again many of them fell. There was a certain unusual quality to them though, the appearance of them bowing away from the wall giving the photos a sort of post production fish eye look. In my feedback from my tutors they suggested I could have pasted the photos as well as the posters directly to the wall. I think this would have been a nice idea if I had been able to pre prepare the surface in some way, for example if I had laid a brown ripped paper rectangle background down behind the images or had more source images to build up a large photo collage around them. However against a white wall I think simply presented photos pasted flat would have looked too one dimensional and washed out against a plain white background, whereas on mount board they atleast had a drop shadow and popped out effect to give them definition. For the future I definitely learnt that a lot of time and frustration can be saved by properly planning secure fixing methods!

It was hard at first to decide how we were going to lay our work out as a group, as many of the pieces were very different to each other however we tried to group certain pieces together due to similarities of themes and presentation. As both myself and Brandon were working atleast in part with installation and employing similar themes of branding and advertising we placed ourselves in the middle of the exhibition to try to add interest and break up the corridor setting.

Jack down the far end had some beautiful paintings which used heavy paint appliation and brush strokes. Intially the group had hoped Charles would arrive with some Basquiat style paintings of his own, so we placed both these painterly artists down the end nearest the door. On this section of the corridor there were multiple lights, all at glancing angles to the wall. When the paintings were hung, the angled light picked out the qualities of the brushwork beautifully and really added to Jack's work. However unfortunately Charles never arrived to install his work so this end of the corridor actually ended up looking quite bare, however I think this part of the corridor would have looked really effective had we had a proper turnout.

We recognised that a lot of people in our group also had work tackling issues surrounding womanhood and femininity. We grouped these together towards the further end of the corridor as we found it thematically interesting to see how multiple artists had approached similar concepts in different ways. It was nice to see three vastly different interpretations of womanhood from three female artist grouped together.

 Meagan's small canvasses were placed above a radiator which framed them nicely and gave a wall area which was proportionate to the size of the works. I really liked the scale of her work, as commonly in these exhibitions students tend to exhibit a large final show piece and it was nice to see Meagan go against convention and exhibit something smaller. It also was great in terms of breaking up our exhibition, as smaller pieces force the audience to move closer to properly view, thus creating a more diverse pathway as viewers make their journey along our corridor.

 I was really happy with how much work was presented, however I still felt like this was perhaps not the best exhibition for my piece to be in in terms of relevence, purely because the drive behind my work was dissimilar to many of the other themes.